Hunter College High School is proud to present the eleventh iteration of our annual Prison Bowl invitational tournament. This tournament will take place on Saturday, March 24, 2018, and will use the house-written Prison Bowl XI set. Our school, Hunter College High School, is located at 71 E 94th Street, New York, NY, 10128, between Park and Madison Avenues. For questions and/or concerns, email tournament director Chloe Levine at chloe.e.w.levine@gmail.com. The vice tournament director is Daniel Ma.

Registration

To register for this tournament, please fill out this form: https://goo.gl/forms/4g54qWio76lVsgzD3. We will try to email you back with a confirmation and an invoice as soon as possible. At least initially, the field will be limited to four teams per school, to try to allow the maximum number of interested schools to compete. For now, the field is capped at 36 teams.

Fee Structure

$70 for the first team from a school
$60 for each subsequent team
-$5 for every working buzzer system
-$10 for each experienced moderator
Minimum fee for schools bringing n teams = $50 x n

Further discounts (such as for travel) can be negotiated on a case-by-case basis with the tournament director.

We prefer payment through a check made out to HCHS Quiz Bowl on the day of the tournament. If this is absolutely impossible, we will also accept cash.

Note: If you have to drop a team less than 3 days before the tournament, you will be still be responsible for paying your registration fees, because last minute cancellations not only are inconvenient for organizers but also create the possibility that other schools may not get the chance to play the full number of rounds for which they paid. Additionally, if you sign up to bring a buzzer system and drop that less than 3 days before the tournament, or forget it on the day of, your fee will not include a deduction for buzzers and will additionally be increased by $10.

Question Set

Prison Bowl XI is a set with slightly harder than regular difficulty written by the Hunter College High School team and a couple of freelance writers. The head editor for this set is Chloe Levine and the vice head editor is Daniel Ma. The sectional editors are Gilad Avrahami, Abishrant Panday, Sam Brochin, Matthew Lehmann (Chicago), and Joshua Kwan (Cornell). The distribution, which does not include computational math, is as follows:

Tournament games will follow standard ACF rules of untimed rounds consisting of 20 tossups and 20 three-part, 30 point bonuses (without bouncebacks). Ties will be broken by tiebreaker tossups. The set will be marked with 15 point powers, and there will also be -5 negs before the end of the tossup (but no double negs).

The tournament itself will consist of bracketed round-robin prelims and rebracketed round-robin playoffs, the details of which will be decided and announced after the field is determined. Teams should expect to play between 9 and 13 rounds depending on the field size and the to-be-determined playoff structure. There will be trophies for top teams, as well as book prizes for top scorers.

Registration will be from 8:00 a.m. to 8:45 a.m., and the first round will begin at approximately 9:00 a.m. The tournament will end between 5:00 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.; the end time will be more precisely announced after the field and structure of the tournament have been determined.

Transportation

Hunter College High School is located at 71 E 94th Street, New York, NY, 10128, between Park and Madison Avenues. From the exterior, it looks like a gigantic brick castle, so it's fairly hard to miss. The closest subway stops are the 96th Street stations on the 6 and Q lines, which are at Lexington Avenue and 2nd Avenue, respectively. Our school is also accessible via the M1-4 buses on and the crosstown M96 bus. There is a bus drop-off area in front of the school on the west side of Park Avenue between 94th and 95th Streets. Cars can park at Majestic Car Park on 94th Street between Park and Lexington Avenues. In case the curb around the school or Majestic Car Park are overcrowded, there is additional parking at the following locations:

Please note that car parks may or may not be able to accommodate buses, large vans, etc. Please contact specific car parks with any questions.

Food

Juice, coffee, and bagels will be provided during registration. The lunch will be approximately one hour, during which time schools are free to explore the many local eateries. Please contact the tournament director if any of your players have food allergies which should warrant concerns.

We are delighted to announce that Prison Bowl XI has just been Platinum certified by the Partnership for Academic Competition Excellence (PACE)! That status means that the top 25% of teams in the field will qualify for PACE's National Scholastic Championship (NSC), to be held the first weekend in June in Reston, VA. More information is available on PACE's website.

As hopefully most of you know, March 24, the date of this tournament, is also the date of the March for Our Lives, a national, student-organized protest in response to the recent Parkland school shooting. I have thought long and hard about whether or not to cancel the tournament, and after talking to many people, I have made the difficult decision that the tournament must go on. As Captain, I have a responsibility to provide for my teammates; if we don't hold the tournament, the cost for attending national tournaments will be prohibitive for many of our players, and though I would love to attend the protest, I cannot prioritize my own political convictions over their ability to be on this team.

THAT SAID: I personally will be participating in the nationwide walkout and various other events, and if you are so inclined, I encourage you all to do the same. We will also have a moment of silence in memory of the victims of gun violence during the opening meeting. Immediately after finals, I will be heading downtown to whatever remains of the demonstrations, and of course, anyone is welcome to join me. In addition, I will make clear to all members of the HCHS team that if they choose not to staff the tournament so that they can attend the protest, they will not be penalized. However, if your team needs to drop due to the protest, please let us know well in advance, as drop fees still apply. If anyone has any ideas about how we could be more respectful of the issue at PBXI, please don't hesitate to contact me. Thank you all very much.

Thanks to everyone for coming! Congrats to High Tech A for defeating Downingtown STEM in the final, and to Bard A for clinching 3rd. Stats are now posted (except for the Round 10 game between Livingston B and East Brunswick A; if anyone has those stats, we'd appreciate them). Combined will be up within a few days, since due to an SQBS glitch, we'll have to re-input every manually. Also, a private discussion forum for the set has been set up, so feel free to join, but please do not discuss the set elsewhere, since there are mirrors. Thanks again!

Combined stats are now up; however, there are some issues with the bonus points, and they will be resolved ASAP to ensure that rankings can be correct for all. I do not currently have access to the prelim score sheets, but I will pore over playoffs to see if I can find the issue there. After spring break, I can get the prelim sheets as well.

Okay, be sure to let me know. Sorry about any inconvenience the errors may have caused.
That said, full stats are finally now up with corrections. I have made no corrections to Great Valley B's games, because I currently have no record of them except the scoresheets our staffers turned in. However, the missing scoresheet has indeed been found. Sorry for all of these delays.